27 April, 2018

The second edition of the handbook Simulating Social Complexity, edited by Bruce Edmonds and Ruth Meyer, has now been published by Springer and is available as a hardcover or eBook (on Springer Link).

This volume examines all aspects of using agent or individual-based
simulation to investigate social systems. Social systems include all
those systems where the components have individual agency but also
interact with each other. This includes human societies, all kinds of
groups, and increasingly socio-technical systems where the
internet-based devices form the substrate for interaction. These systems
are central to our lives, but are among the most complex known. The
complexity often makes analytic approaches infeasible but, on the other
hand, natural language approaches are also inadequate for relating
intricate cause and effect. This is why individual and agent-based
computational approaches hold out the possibility of new and deeper
understanding of such systems.

This second edition adds new chapters on different modelling purposes
and applying software engineering methods to simulation development.
Revised existing content of other chapters keeps the book up-to-date with recent
developments. This volume will help those new to the field avoid
“reinventing the wheel” each time, and give them a solid and wide
grounding in the essential issues. It will also help those already in
the field by providing accessible overviews of current thought. The
material is divided into four sections: Introduction, Methodology,
Mechanisms, and Applications.

Important dates:

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Deadline for submissions:1
May 2018

Notification of acceptance:25
May 2018

Camera-ready copy of papers:15
June 2018

Workshop:14
or 15 July 2018

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Much of AI
only makes sense within the social systems they are embedded. In the real world
these social systems in their turn are created and maintained by the people and
thus their cognitive abilities.

In this
workshop, we want to explore the interactions between cognitive and social
aspects of so-called socio-cognitive systems. The workshop connects elements of
IJCAI/ECAI, AAMAS and ICML. Of course, modelling these systems in terms of
Multi-Agent Systems seems intuitive, but would require special attention to the
social concepts in these MAS. The cognitive abilities of the agents should
adapt themselves to the social context and development, which connects this
area to machine learning in a social context.

The topics of the workshop include but are not limited
to:

Social norms, conventions and practices

Institutions

Social networks and their dynamics

Group recognition and membership

Development of (social)

IdentityStatus and power relations

Plan coordination

Social agency

Social adaptation

Social self-regulation

The construction of social reality

Complex negotiations

Agreed naming and reference

Cultural coherence

Foundations of Communication

The construction and coordination of complex value-chains

Enculturation

Co-development of social context

SCS welcomes
high-quality research that goes beyond looking at social aspects of individual
cognition or the properties of individuals in social systems and seeks to truly
integrate these two layers. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary research, work that seeks to tackle areas that
have been ignored before and novel approaches to relating the cognitive and the
social. We are agnostic about the kind of approach or tools used, but favour
approaches with an identifiable empirical or computational/formal content -
both systems constructed for a particular goal in mind and models of observed
or theoretical systems. However, the aim is to give new insights - into social
science, cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence - merely formalising or
implementing a system is not enough. We welcome contributions from a wide range
of standpoints as long as this does not involve an effective reduction to only
the individual or social levels.

Papers will undergo the normal
review process and are selected on the basis of quality. However, when choices
have to be made we will try to spread the accepted papers over the main themes
of the workshop. Interesting ideas are more important in this respect than
detailed results on fringe topics.

A selection of the best papers of the workshop will be
considered for a special issue of the new Springer journal on Socio-Cognitive
Systems.

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Formatting guidelines:

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We encourage participants to
submit a paper (15 pages max), describing their work on one or more of the
topics mentioned above. All non-presenting participants will need to submit a
one-page position statement which presents their view on socio-cognitive
systems relative to (one of) the workshop topics.

All submissions must include the
author's name(s), affiliation, complete mailing address, phone number, fax
number and email address. Please use the LNCS format for formatting your paper.

All accepted submissions and
position statements will be published in the workshop proceedings.